Joel Thomas
ERH-205WX
Help Received: None
The Parable of the Old Man and the Young Short Assignment
- The speaker in this poem is someone recounting the story in Genesis of God telling Abraham (or Abram) to sacrifice his son, but with a grim, 20th century twist at the end. In the poem, Abram, Isaac, and the Angel all speak.
- The poem is an allegory, based on a story from Genesis. It starts with Abram taking his son, Isaac, up a mountain as a sacrifice to God. When they reach the top, Isaac asks where the animal that would typically be sacrificed is, but Abram binds him and prepares to sacrifice him. At the last minute, an angel comes down and tells Abram not to sacrifice his son, but rather “the ram of pride”, but Abram does not listen and instead slaughters Isaac “[a]nd half the seed of Europe, one by one,” making it clear that this poem alludes to the killing of Europe’s youth by old men who cannot put their pride and blind nationalism aside.
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- The lines “[b]ehold,/A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;/Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him,” struck me as especially poignant. In the original bible story, the ram makes a last-minute appearance, which Abraham sacrifices instead of his son, on God’s commands. In Owen’s poem, however, it seems as if the ram has been there from the beginning, obvious to anyone who could see it, and Abram’s refusal to slaughter it comes only out of his willful blindness, not any sort of higher calling.
- I also thought it was significant that, where the bible story begins with God telling Abram to take his son up the mountain and sacrifice him, the poem opens with no such command, making it seem as if Abram is acting on his own murderous volition. In fact, the only time at which the divine makes itself known is when the angel comes to plead with Abram to stop. By starting the poem without any divine mandate, then, Owen subverts the classical biblical narrative of sacrifice, turning Abram’s actions from a divine, yet flawed, act into wanton, needless slaughter.